If you’ve ever played video games uch as Call of Duty, you’ve ncountered intelligent agents — computer programs that gather and deliver information.

The more data your fellow troops or
enemy soldiers gather about your likely
response patterns, the “smarter” their
actions get.

Beyond the world of gaming, intelligent agents have lifesaving potential, says
Professor Christopher Dancy, computer
science, who develops computer software
and intelligent agents in the cognitive-science area. His primary interests
are creating agents that think and
behave like humans under normal, and
sometimes dangerous, circumstances.

Dancy has worked on medical-related
simulations in which intelligent agents
are coded as virtual patients who
experience heart attacks. Medical
personnel-in-training make decisions
and perform procedures on the agents.

“If you are testing a trainee’s response
to a heart attack in real life, it’s a lot
more dangerous, given that a human
patient would be at risk,” says Dancy.
“In a virtual environment, we can test
trainees’ responses, how they might use
a defibrillator and the various stimuli
that might impact their decisions.” He
also studies how sleep deprivation affects
decision making and response times.

Understanding human behavior iskey, says Dancy. During experimentswith students he observes their decision-making capabilities by asking them toplay a game. He records how theyrespond to their external environmentand what they decide. “The best way tomeasure if the simulation is successfulis if the software is actually mimickinghow the students responded,” he says.

Dancy hopes his students will
develop a computational mindset to
solving problems. “When you have
software to fall back on, it sometimes
makes it a little easier to see solutions,
because we interact with computers
daily,” he says. “I want my students to
understand why they are developing
programs and how the solutions impact
the world around them.”

“For millennia, childbirth fell under the provenance of women,”
says Professor Jennifer Kosmin, history. That changed, however, during the 18th century, as childbirth was increasingly
“seen as something that could only be fully understood by
a medical expert — and of course, that expert would almost
always be male,” she explains.

Kosmin, who studies the history and cultural implications
of Western medicine in terms of gender, power and legitimacy,
explores the medicalization of childbirth in her course Sex,
Race & Science. The class also covers the history of the
concept of race; the racialization of disease; Alfred Kinsey’s
interpretation of heterosexuality; and the impact of genomic
mapping on the understandings of race, disease and sex.

In another class she examines
history through the lens of death
and disease. “We consider the
discovery of saints’ relics,” she
says. “What did it mean to have
bones, believed to have magical properties, discovered in
your village?” Other topics are the cultural effects of the
Black Death, non-Western concepts of disease, mass deaths
and disfigurements during the American Civil War and the
public dissections of criminals in Italy in the 1700s. “Believe
it or not, these were often festive events that coincided with
the Carnival season,” Kosmin says. — Paula Franken